It's the busiest month of the year for me, I shouldn't be on Twitter but I came just to address this meme bc it's driving me insane. I ignored it the 1st time I saw it bc I didn't take it seriously but I still see it being unironically shared around and just HAVE to address it.

The placing of Chomsky next to Lenin & Marx is a bit weird since he's not very aligned with them, and he's already notorious for his "blue no matter who" stance so including him isn't very persuasive. The quote itself isn't persuasive either, as it assumes that the best way...

to assume responsibility for one's actions is to vote, but we're talking about representative democracy here, a very bad one in which elected politicians are almost completely unaccountable so it's certainly not self-evident that that's how you assume responsibility for yourself.

That Chomsky quote could even be turned around by pointing out the consequences of, in the midst of BLM protests, supporting a politician who wrote the 1994 crime bill, and who's vice president is an actual ex-cop who actively contributed to mass incarceration.

But my main problem is with the Marx & Lenin quotes bc using them just makes absolutely no sense. It's not even a matter of whether you support voting for Biden, it's just that those quotes are being horribly abused, they don't support the meme's point whatsoever.

The Lenin quote is about communists (as he says, "the party of the revolutionary proletariat") participating in elections not in order to implement any particular policy or transform society, but as a way of popularizing socialist views, educating workers about them, etc.

For that quote to support voting for Biden you would have to somehow think that Biden is a socialist, or that he will spread socialist views, or that the fucking Democrat Party is "the party of the revolutionary proletariat". Pls tell me no one thinks that?

The historical context of the quote is made clear when Lenin refers to "undeveloped ... rural masses", meaning the Russian peasants, who no longer exist. It's not exactly clear that in today's US an effective way to popularize socialist views is through parliamentary elections.

But that's not my main problem with using the quote. It could reasonably be used in support of voting for a socialist/communist party and maybe electing socialists to congress, but Biden? I thought republicans were the ones who thought Biden is secretly a communist.

The Marx quote though... That's... the absolute worst one. What's incredible is if you went to earlier Marx texts you could find something that, at least on the surface, seemed in support of participating in bourgeois elections. After all, Marx used to focus on electoral...

politics a lot more before the Paris Commune happened. But they used a quote from a preface written ABOUT the Paris Commune, which directly goes against what they're trying to argue. It's like they were TRYING to find a Marx quote that contradicts their point as much as possible.

I can only assume they interpreted the quote (completely out of context) as saying that bc the working class can't simply take over and use the state for its own purposes, it must first change it through elections. What it's really saying is that bc workers can't wield the...

state for its own purposes, they must first SMASH it, and establish a new, workers' state along radical-democratic lines completely contrary to bourgeois representative democracy. I mean, the quote mentions the Paris Commune right there. Did the creator think the Paris Commune...

was established through voting? Marx explicitly praised it as being a revolution AGAINST the state, and took from it that the working class cannot change society by working from within bourgeois politics, but must instead destroy it and create its own institutions.

To support voting for Biden, they chose a Marx quote from the exact period where Marx most explicitly went against all bourgeois electoral and parliamentary politics. The sentence right before the one quoted describes the Commune as the proles in power, so to use it...

in support of voting for Biden you would have to think that Biden being president would be equivalent to the working class being in power. We don't have a Paris Commune in today's USA, but the closest equivalent would be one of the autonomous zones set up during the riots...

and Biden (or any other bourgeois politician) being the one who'd gladly send in the national guard to murder or imprison the people organizing.

In conclusion: vote for Biden if you want to, doesn't rly matter. But please stop trying to argue that voting for a neoliberal rapist is in any way socialist praxis. Socialism has been distorted and slandered by republicans more than enough for gods' sake.

And not distorting what constitutes socialist praxis is especially important given that we live in a time of returning mass action and self-organizing around the world. There are so many organizing opportunities and electoralism, like always, is being used to disarm them.